'She imagines it to be the attraction of everyone, rather than her own beauty.'
'And once she conceived it to be the attraction of Allan; but she knows better now—that he loves, or loved, her for herself alone.'
'She has already had two peers and a baronet in her train, all drawn thither, I fear, by her money-bags alone, and young Carslogie of Ours seemed desperately smitten, too.'
'Ours?'
'Well, I always think of the Black Watch as 'Ours'—it is force of habit—a good-looking fellow, well-born, well-bred, with plenty of money.'
'Allan is his equal in all these and more; but what he and she mean by dallying and delaying as they do, I cannot conceive.'
Allan had looked upon Olive at the recent marriage in her striking costume as a bridesmaid, and thought she had never appeared to greater advantage.
Why should she not have figured there as a bride too? What was the secret spring of this doubt and mistrust that had come between them again, and which she shrank from attempting to explain?
To do her justice, she was often on the point of doing so; but a sentiment of miserable fear of what Allan might do, think, or say, if made aware of the deep affront Holcroft was capable of inflicting upon his future wife, tied her tongue.
Better would it have been a thousand times had she trusted to Allan fully and implicitly, and to the means he might put in force to procure or purchase the silence for ever of such a reptile as her tormentor.